200 most important geography topics - Sykalo Eugene 2025

Nationalism

So, What Is Nationalism? (And Why Does It Sometimes Make Us Cry?)

At its core, nationalism is an idea—a charged and often tender belief that a group of people, united by common culture, language, history, or even mythology, should form a nation-state. But it’s not just a political theory. It’s a feeling, an energy that crackles when a football team scores in the final seconds or when a tiny country stands up to a global giant and says, “No.”

It’s not just about geography. It’s about identity. About the very specific shape of your grandmother’s pronunciation, or the odd way your town celebrates New Year’s with boiled chestnuts and ancestral chants. Nationalism takes these quirks and amplifies them, turns them into rallying cries—or, sometimes, into battle songs.

But let’s not mistake it for patriotism, which is more like a warm bath of pride for your homeland. Nationalism is hotter, rawer. It demands. It doesn’t just love the nation—it believes the nation should be sovereign, sometimes exclusive, and often glorified. And therein lies both its allure and its danger.

Nations Built Like Bonfires

Think of a nation not as a bounded plot of land but as a bonfire at the center of a dark forest. The warmth draws people in. They sing songs, cook stews, teach stories to the next generation. But nationalism is the fuel they throw on that fire. It can make the flames dance higher, visible across continents. Or it can rage out of control.

The 19th century practically glowed with nationalism. The unification of Italy? Nationalism. The birth of Germany out of a patchwork of principalities? Nationalism. The poetry of Adam Mickiewicz, the blood of Garibaldi, the battle cries in the Balkans—it was all part of the same fever dream. The dream that each people deserved their own place, flag, anthem, infrastructure, and—of course—borders.

And those borders, let me tell you, don’t behave like lines on a map. They behave like riverbeds—cut by generations of language, war, migration, and the stubborn roots of belonging. Sometimes they vanish under snow. Sometimes they overflow. But they always come back.

The Double-Edged Soil: Beauty and Brutality

Now, I won’t romanticize it too much. Nationalism gave us soaring independence movements, yes. Gandhi’s India. Vietnam's long, aching cry for self-rule. Ghana’s electric assertion that colonial chains were not eternal. These moments had rhythm, you know? Like drums calling across mountains.

But nationalism also gave us trenches filled with bodies. Genocides. Ethnic cleansings. Barbed wire. It can turn inclusion into exclusion, pride into paranoia. It’s a short walk from “We are one people” to “They are not us.”

I once stood in a former schoolroom in Kigali, Rwanda. You could still smell the chalk dust. The nationalism that had once taught children to sing their homeland’s praises turned to something unrecognizable. That classroom—once a place of unity—had seen division so violent it’s hard to name without trembling.

So, yes. Nationalism can carry symphonies or sirens.

And Yet… Why Does It Still Matter?

Because we are humans. We want to belong. We need stories that tell us who we are and where we come from. We crave the intimacy of us—a word so small it can move armies.

Nationalism taps into that raw, root-level need. It gives people dignity, sometimes when the world has stripped it away. It says, “You’re not invisible. You’re part of something vast, ancient, and real.” That’s powerful. That’s dangerous. That’s human.

And it shapes our transportation networks too—oh yes, the veins of nations. I can’t resist this part. Nationalism doesn’t just stop at emotion—it paves roads, builds railways, lays cables across mountains. Think of the Trans-Siberian Railway, not just a marvel of engineering but a nationalist declaration—we connect the East to the West because we are one empire.

Or the Interstate Highway System in the United States—born in part from Cold War anxieties and national defense strategies, yes, but also a way to knit (ah, no, not knit—wrong metaphor—maybe bolt) the vastness of the American idea into steel and asphalt.

Even modern logistics systems—how goods move, how people travel—are often shaped by borders that nationalism carved and defended. I mean, just try transporting citrus from Lebanon into Israel or fuel across the Korean DMZ. Nationalism doesn’t just whisper in hearts—it dictates customs forms and flight routes.

A Little Memory: Flags on Buses in Kathmandu

In 2016, I rode a rattling bus through the Kathmandu Valley. Every bus had a flag, not the Nepali national one, but a village flag, or a political party banner. They fluttered like tiny declarations of identity. We stopped once for tea—milky and sweet with a hint of cardamom—and the driver tapped the steering wheel and said, almost shyly, “My father died for that flag.”

I didn’t know what to say. What can you say?

What Does Nationalism Mean Now?

In our era of global connectivity, nationalism gets twitchy. The internet doesn’t care about borders, but humans still do. Algorithms may speak Esperanto, but my grandmother still curses in Hungarian when frustrated. The dream of a global village? It’s compelling. But nationalism is not extinct—it’s evolving.

You’ll find it in digital spaces—hashtags like battle flags. Memes as manifestos. Even nationalism now has an app.

And yet, it always returns to the land, to territory, to the thrum of people saying: This is ours. We belong. Whether it's Catalonia voting, Scotland dreaming, or Taiwan resisting erasure—nationalism persists, reshapes, and often reasserts itself with unexpected force.

So… Is It Good or Bad?

Wrong question, really.

It’s like asking if fire is good. It warms. It burns. It illuminates. It destroys.

Nationalism is a tool, a story, a thunderstorm. It builds schools and prisons. It liberates and oppresses. And it's utterly, unmistakably human.

We created it. And it created us, in return.

The Unfinishable Ending

The flags wave. The borders shift. The infrastructure hums with movement. And deep in some town you’ve never heard of—maybe yours, maybe mine—an old woman smooths a fraying flag on her shoulder bag. And she smiles.

Because, somehow, impossibly, absurdly... it’s still hers.

And that means something.